I don't know. The comments from her acolytes when she posts snippets, are full of fawning praise and how they can't wait to read the full thing
I don't know. The comments from her acolytes when she posts snippets, are full of fawning praise and how they can't wait to read the full thingWhile I’ve been enjoying the excerpts - which are EXACTLY as I suspected they would be - I’m still to come across anything funny. I mean all of it is amusing (not least because it reads like parody and my head goes to various Coogan characters as I read - Partridge is the obvious one, but also Paul / Pauline Calf), but clearly not intentionally. The specs of car / phd gangster bit had me genuinely laughing out loud (most I know with phds were in poverty, vulnerable, are working class, didn’t ’fit in’ to academic life - that she believes she is exceptional in that regard tells
As always these snippets reveal true parts of Jessica she thinks are well protected and hidden - brilliantly demonstrated by @AccidentalAcademic in her recent post. I also feel that hard cringe - like reading your own teenage poetry half a decade on.
I’m interested in how this poorly written ego fest will be taken by the poor souls who have pre ordered. I suspect out of loyalty they won’t feed back but quietly detach from her.
I don't think she knows how quotes work.
Not the point but she needs some moisturiser on those crusty lips.
I don't know if she believes other people were fixated on her because she was "chavvy", as she keeps describing herself, or because they were envious of her being "strong and successful" enough to "treat herself" to a sports car. That excerpt is another tell: she clearly sees expensive possessions as measures of worth, and she wants to flaunt the car because she sees it as a reflection of her talent, but she's still Jenny from the block who is being oppressed and disadvantaged and looked down on for being underclass...by whom? A bunch of fellow PhD students who would probably struggle to afford one of those old red and yellow pedal cars from the Early Learning Centre? (As academia grows ever more precarious, so would many of the academics supervising them, come to that.) JT tries to curate a radical image by talking about systematic oppression, but at the same time she wants to believe that she pulled herself out of poverty by her bootstraps. This is why every excerpt from Underclass that she's shared so far is devoid of any meaningful analysis or reflection - it's just anecdote after anecdote about how unique and clever and hard done by she's always been, but how it's OK now, because being unique and clever saved her and now she gets to laugh at all the people who didn't think she was unique and clever.The specs of car / phd gangster bit had me genuinely laughing out loud (most I know with phds were in poverty, vulnerable, are working class, didn’t ’fit in’ to academic life - that she believes she is exceptional in that regard tells
Anyone who has seen more than one book launch of hers is eventually going to realise that there is a pattern: whenever a new book is coming out, there will be a crisis in Jessica's life (doxxing! Trolls! Harassment! Serious illness!), and she will ramp up the rants about how people have always tried and failed to keep her down. It's her main marketing strategy. She encourages readers/buyers to see themselves as supporting the underdog. It worked on me the first time. I ordered from the VictimFocus store after she claimed she'd been doxxed and hacked by MRAs because of the impending release of Why Women Are Blamed for Everything. I did wonder how a book that was being self-published with Amazon's printing platform could have attracted such a cyclone of hostile attention before it was even out - it is incredibly rare for any book to get that kind of attention, even one that has the marketing department of a major international publisher behind it - but I assumed that one link had been shared to some alt-right forum or something and she'd just been unlucky in how it had snowballed. Then similar things happened with Sexy But Psycho, only this time the narrative was all about bitter envious academics and sinister psychiatrists who wanted to shut her up. And this time we've had lots of vague allusions to health problems and courts and stalkers and police, followed by the usual bragging taunts ("They said I couldn't achieve, but look at me now!"), and it's all such a transparent predictable grift. I think she relies on new readers to keep up the cycle.I’m interested in how this poorly written ego fest will be taken by the poor souls who have pre ordered. I suspect out of loyalty they won’t feed back but quietly detach from her.
Spot on, all of this.I don't know if she believes other people were fixated on her because she was "chavvy", as she keeps describing herself, or because they were envious of her being "strong and successful" enough to "treat herself" to a sports car. That excerpt is another tell: she clearly sees expensive possessions as measures of worth, and she wants to flaunt the car because she sees it as a reflection of her talent, but she's still Jenny from the block who is being oppressed and disadvantaged and looked down on for being underclass...by whom? A bunch of fellow PhD students who would probably struggle to afford one of those old red and yellow pedal cars from the Early Learning Centre? (As academia grows ever more precarious, so would many of the academics supervising them, come to that.) JT tries to curate a radical image by talking about systematic oppression, but at the same time she wants to believe that she pulled herself out of poverty by her bootstraps. This is why every excerpt from Underclass that she's shared so far is devoid of any meaningful analysis or reflection - it's just anecdote after anecdote about how unique and clever and hard done by she's always been, but how it's OK now, because being unique and clever saved her and now she gets to laugh at all the people who didn't think she was unique and clever.
Anyone who has seen more than one book launch of hers is eventually going to realise that there is a pattern: whenever a new book is coming out, there will be a crisis in Jessica's life (doxxing! Trolls! Harassment! Serious illness!), and she will ramp up the rants about how people have always tried and failed to keep her down. It's her main marketing strategy. She encourages readers/buyers to see themselves as supporting the underdog. It worked on me the first time. I ordered from the VictimFocus store after she claimed she'd been doxxed and hacked by MRAs because of the impending release of Why Women Are Blamed for Everything. I did wonder how a book that was being self-published with Amazon's printing platform could have attracted such a cyclone of hostile attention before it was even out - it is incredibly rare for any book to get that kind of attention, even one that has the marketing department of a major international publisher behind it - but I assumed that one link had been shared to some alt-right forum or something and she'd just been unlucky in how it had snowballed. Then similar things happened with Sexy But Psycho, only this time the narrative was all about bitter envious academics and sinister psychiatrists who wanted to shut her up. And this time we've had lots of vague allusions to health problems and courts and stalkers and police, followed by the usual bragging taunts ("They said I couldn't achieve, but look at me now!"), and it's all such a transparent predictable grift. I think she relies on new readers to keep up the cycle.
She did her undergraduate degree with the Open University. Many of their courses have no formal entry requirements and they have always encouraged students from non-traditional backgrounds to apply, so she wouldn't have needed A-levels. The OU uses introductory modules as scaffolding for people who aren't ready for BA/BSc level study as soon as they arrive, and their courses are a good way for anyone who had a rocky time at school to get back on track educationally.I was wondering - how did she get to uni? She says never turned up at school but got 10,000 A****s, but she must have gone onto college and did A Levels. It's weird she only talks about school and uni and not the bit in-between. I suspect because it wasn't as poverty striken as she claims. I'd have loved to be able to afford driving lessons and a car at uni. Lessons alone can run into hundreds.
I seem to have completely missed she’s made this character. The language and descriptions is awful. And coming from a “psychologist” specialising in trauma… it’s just unforgivable.Whether 'Simpo' is actually a real person or just a character Jessica has created, I think he says something about her worldview.
She paints a clear picture of someone with learning difficulties or other additional needs when she describes his ban from using anything sharper than plastic safety scissors, the limp, and the sleeves that were soggy from constant chewing. As an academic psychologist I carried out a lot of my research with vulnerable young people. Reading that anecdote, my first thought was to wonder whether 'Simpo' was targeting someone with an obvious marker of vulnerability (the baby in the pram) because it happened to be more prominent than his own. It's pretty clear from the contempt with which JT writes about him that he was bullied himself - if bad treatment of 'Simpo' and people like him hadn't been normalised, she wouldn't be able to sneer at him without realising that it doesn't actually make her look like the bigger person in that situation. Kids who have been bullied don't automatically become bullies themselves; that's a very crude oversimplification. But if they lack the linguistic and/or emotional vocabulary to describe their own experiences and make sense of how they feel, if they haven't grown up in a consistently safe, nurturing environment with caring relatives and skilled professionals to help them them fill in those blanks, then yes, they're at greater risk of becoming bullies too. I've met quite a few 'Simpos': young people who just couldn't grasp that it might be possible to have a relationship when they weren't at risk of being scapegoated, and who believed that the only way to draw fire away from the target on their own backs was to try and stick a target on someone else's. It wasn't something they did consciously, but this is how they experienced the world.
Would I blame teenage Jessica Taylor for not understanding that? No, because she was a kid herself. But I think it's reasonable to expect someone who markets herself as a "leading trauma-informed psychologist" to understand it, and to show a little more compassion and insight than she has in that excerpt. Why does she even bring up the features that marked Simpo out as 'different'? It's certainly not part of any thoughtful exploration of how working class kids with SEN are failed by almost every system they come into contact with. It's to show off how sassy and resilient she was as a teenager. That line basically reads as, "Even when I got bullied for being a teenage mum, I didn't feel inferior or ashamed. I just thought about Simpo's obvious disability and wondered how come the sp*zzy r*tard got to drive! Haha."
Then, as if working class disabled people don't get accused of being lying benefit-scrounging leeches often enough, she announces that doctors had found his limp was faked "for attention". (There is no mention of how she would know this - were the local GPs were so in awe of Jessica's prodigious intellect that they were calling her in to share the details of all their patients and get her personal take?) Even if there was no physical cause for his limp, any psychologist worth their salt should know that people with cognitive disabilities sometimes develop psychosomatic physical conditions. There are multiple possible reasons for that, but the simplest - and saddest - is that intellectual disability carries such a painful stigma that people can end up taking refuge behind a problem that feels more acceptable, or at least easier to bear. This doesn't make them fakers. Even if the cause isn't organic, it's a manifestation of genuine distress that needs actual treatment from an actual trauma-informed clinician.
Even if 'Simpo' is just a figment of her imagination, he still exposes her lack of psychological knowledge or capacity to reflect, because the way she's framed that anecdote makes it very clear that she thinks this is a perfectly acceptable way to talk about people like him. A lot of ignorance and prejudice on display here, Jess.
I think the not in school stuff is BS. She was featured on a teaching channel show filmed at her school. How likely is a school to pick the hardly ever there, "trouble" kid to represent them on something like that?I was wondering - how did she get to uni? She says never turned up at school but got 10,000 A****s, but she must have gone onto college and did A Levels. It's weird she only talks about school and uni and not the bit in-between. I suspect because it wasn't as poverty striken as she claims. I'd have loved to be able to afford driving lessons and a car at uni. Lessons alone can run into hundreds.
I saw that too. Where she is talking about the best revision apps.I think the not in school stuff is BS. She was featured on a teaching channel show filmed at her school. How likely is a school to pick the hardly ever there, "trouble" kid to represent them on something like that?
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Brace yourselves.
Is it available anywhere/any idea when it was released? Ie was it at the time she was taking her GCSEs when she supposedly hadn’t been to school for a yearI saw that too. Where she is talking about the best revision apps.
It.was on her Instagram page I think. I've definitely posted it here too but many threads back. She talks about her GCSES in it I'm sure.Is it available anywhere/any idea when it was released? Ie was it at the time she was taking her GCSEs when she supposedly hadn’t been to school for a year
To be honest, I doubt she'd bat an eye even if a male psychologist did say it, because she just doesn't know enough to recognise how wrong it is. It probably wouldn't even register with her.I seem to have completely missed she’s made this character. The language and descriptions is awful. And coming from a “psychologist” specialising in trauma… it’s just unforgivable.
I wonder what she’d say if another psychologist, especially male, spoke with such language…
Yes strange that she prides herself on anti pathology but has not a peep to say about gay children being pathologised as trans and set up for a lifetime of medical intervention.I note she hasn't spoken about The Cass Report. Strange considering she made her name initially as a proud terf.
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